— ABOUT CONSCIOUS SCHOOLS
Built by educators who got tired of watching
the same reforms fail for the same reasons.
—THE ORIGIN
We did not start with a theory. We started with years living the work.
Conscious Schools was founded in 2017 by Dr. Nathan Smalley — a former classroom teacher, school founder, district leader, and national Chief-level executive at KIPP. He built it from a specific kind of frustration: the frustration of someone who had worked at every level of the education system and watched, from every vantage point, the same pattern repeat.
A new initiative arrives. People are trained. Coaches are hired. Two years later, walk into any classroom in the district and the initiative is nowhere to be found. Not because the educators lacked commitment. Not because the initiative was wrong. Because programs do not change practice. Conditions do. And the field has spent decades investing in programs while leaving the conditions unbuilt.
What Conscious Schools is built to do — what distinguishes it from the professional development organizations that came before it — is to work on the conditions directly. Not the tools educators use. The practices they develop, the structures that make growth possible, the shared language that turns individual improvement into collective capacity.
This is slower work. It is the only work that holds.
— WHAT WE BELIEVE
Three convictions that drive everything we do.
These are not values statements. They are the working conclusions after decades of practice in schools — things we have tested against reality enough times to hold them with confidence, and that shape every decision we make about how to work with schools and systems.
01
Conditions, not programs.
Programs transfer knowledge. Conditions change practice. The difference between a school that improves and stays improved and one that shows gains and reverts is almost always the difference between a school that built conditions and one that ran programs. Every investment we make is oriented toward the former.
02
Practices, not protocols.
Protocols can be handed to people. Practices have to be built — over time, with support, in real conditions. A practice, once genuinely developed, is inside the person. You cannot lose a practice the way you lose a program. This is why our work is sustained and structured rather than episodic. There is no shortcut to practice.
03
The long horizon.
Schools that improve dramatically do so over years, not quarters. The dominant pattern in education reform — short grant cycles, annual outcome expectations, leadership turnover that resets priorities — is perfectly designed to produce the cycle of hope and disappointment the field has lived inside for decades. We accept a longer time horizon. We ask our partners to do the same.
"The problem is not that we lack knowledge about what works. The problem is that we have consistently failed to build the conditions in which that knowledge can take root."
— MICHAEL FULLAN
— THE FOUNDER
Nate began his career teaching English Language Arts in Jersey City, New Jersey — at the second-lowest performing high school in the state. He broke up thirteen fights in the first two months of his first year. The teacher who learned to teach in a classroom where the first order of business was student safety is a different practitioner than one who learned in a school where the hardest problem was Chromebook management.
He taught ELA across grades five through twelve, earning a state teacher of the year award along the way, then moved into building. He founded a KIPP high school in Newark, served in a variety of district leadership roles, and served as Chief of Leadership Development at KIPP nationally — responsible for the leadership pipeline across hundreds of schools, dozens of cities, tens of thousands of students.
What he found at that altitude — what the work revealed about the difference between leader training and leader development, between strategy and conditions, between what schools say they do and what they actually do — became the engine of everything that followed. He has also since trained thousands of teachers and leaders around the country, welcoming them to practices that stick.
All of his education work — every classroom, every school, every leadership position — has been in low-income communities. Not as a policy commitment. As a fact of his professional life, chosen from the beginning and never reconsidered.
Former Chief of Leadership Development, KIPP national
Former District Leader (Chief Academic Officer, Head of Schools), multiple organizations
Founder, KIPP Newark Collegiate Academy, sending more Black students to college than any other school in NJ.
PhD in School Improvement, Texas State University — qualitative research, improvement science, and pedagogy,
Author of (forthcoming) Catalyst: Leadership Practices that Transform Schools
Nathan Smalley, PhD
FOUNDER & CEO
—HOW WE WORK
Three forms. One Purpose.
Every offering Conscious Schools produces is built around the same core question: what does this person or system actually need in order to practice differently? The answer shapes the form. The form serves the practice. The practice produces the conditions. The conditions hold.
Intensives
Immersive, multi-day professional learning.
Designed for cohorts drawn from across a district, charter network, or region. Intensives build shared instructional language across a system and create professional learning conditions that outlast the event itself. The return is not a good day of professional development but a cohort of leaders or teachers who practice differently.
Cohorts
Year-long engagements that build practice over time.
For instructional leaders, campus leaders, and master teachers committed to deepening their practice across an academic year. The work is cumulative — each session builds on the last — and the cohort itself becomes a professional community that holds members accountable to ongoing growth.
Practice Support
Sustained in-school partnership.
For schools and systems ready to embed Conscious Schools practices into the daily texture of professional life. Practice support goes beyond a cohort or intensive to shape how observation, coaching, and professional learning actually function in a building. This is the work after the work — the difference between attending a program and building a culture.
— THE TEAM
School-tested. Expert. Practical.
Most professional development organizations hire trainers. Conscious Schools works differently — as a collaborative of independent practitioners, each a domain expert who has spent years doing the work in real schools. They are not people who learned about teaching from frameworks. They are people who taught, led, and then chose to stay close to that work rather than leave it behind.
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Nathan Smalley, Ph.D.
FOUNDER & CEO
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Cherese Brauer, M.Ed.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
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Lindsay Dapp Kern, B.S.
SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER
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Jessica Escobedo, B.S.
CHIEF OF OPERATIONS
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Melissa Gall, M.Ed.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
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Jennifer Keyte, M.Ed., MSW, LCSW.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
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Aja Settles, M.Ed.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
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Carlo Schmidt, M.Div.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
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Lauren Whitfield, Ed.D.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
—WORK WITH US
If the work we do is the work you need, we want to talk.
We are not the right partner for every organization. We are the right fit for those who resonate with the approach described here, who want to make student success inevitable.